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November 2018

30 November 2018

A baggage handler employed by Piedmont Airlines was still in the cargo hold
of a Boeing 737 when it took off from Kansas City, Missouri. Since the
cargo hold was heated and pressurised, he remained safe - safely asleep
for the duration of the journey. When discovered upon arrival in Chicago,
the hapless luggage-lifter stated that he was simply intoxicated.
According to Chicago Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, he was sent
back to the airport of origin, and no charges have been filed.

North Carolina's Donna Sue Hudgins visited an undertaker's office,
explaining that she wanted to make funeral arrangements for her mother,
who had died that morning and been taken away by emergency medical
workers. Facing dead ends in their efforts to locate the deceased
Nellie Hudgins, staff there called in the Enfield police, who paid a
visit to 69-year-old Donna's home. The corpse had been quietly
decomposing there for several months. This helps to explain why
Nellie Hudgins had been 'sleeping' or 'busy' whenever family members
had expressed an interest in seeing her. Another piece of explanation
comes from a police report stating that Donna had been 'curious and
wanted to see the stages of death'. She has been charged with
felonious concealment of death.

Florida's Justin Foster decided to express his feelings to his
ex-girlfriend's current boyfriend. Allegedly, this involved Foster,
28, flying to Chicago, driving a rental car to the boyfriend's town,
accosting him in the street, and hitting him in the head with a tyre
iron. A short while later, the victim's severed penis had been thrown
over a fence and he had been dragged out of view behind a parked
car.
After a passer-by found the victim, who was left with permanent
brain damage, Foster was arrested back in Florida. Among the evidence
linking him to the crime was a set of threatening text messages from
him to the victim and the ex-girlfriend and the fact that Foster's
initials had been carved into the man's leg. Foster has been extradited
to Chicago, where a judge has granted him a $1 million bond.

Other maiming news from the South comes from Bristol, Tennessee. The
Sullivan County Sheriff's Office reports that a local man
was mowing his front garden when his 76-year-old father,
identified as Douglas Ferguson, ran at him with a running chainsaw.
This is why the older man soon ended up run over by a lawn-mower and with
one fewer leg. After his release from hospital, he was
jailed for attempted second-degree murder and for violating parole in
relation to an earlier aggravated assault. The two men are engaged in
a long-running feud.

A 69-year old Dutch man doesn't like being 69, and he wants to do something about it: change
his birth date. Pointing out the parallels to legally changing one's name or gender, Emile
Ratelband explains that he is already a 'young god' but that if officially 49 years old he
could be readily approved for loans and find more work as 'the best European speaker'. Along
with side-stepping age-based discrimination, he cited potential advantages on the dating
scene (where, according to his Web site, he is 'in a steady relationship with the woman of
his dreams').
Ratelband has agreed to forgo his old-age pension once officials amend his age on
official documents. He is suing his local authority for refusing to do so despite
assurance from his physician that he has the body of a 45-year-old.
His lawyer, Jan-Hein Kuijpers, looks forward to the ruling, stating
that it's high time for the reversal of age, adding in his comments in
court: 'There is also something like common sense, of course.'

In France, meanwhile, Rosa-Maria Da Cruz's partner and three children
had no idea that she was pregnant. She later concealed giving birth
and the existence of the resulting child, Serena, whom she
clandestinely moved between her home and her car in the course of the
day. The child's existence came to light when Da Cruz took that car
for repairs at a shop in Terrasson-Lavilledieu, where a mechanic heard
strange sounds emanating from the boot. Investigating, he discovered
the faeces-encrusted Serena, by now a malnourished two-year-old, within.
Although Da Cruz saw the girl as 'not a baby but a thing', she
told the police that she had at least started talking to Serena, once
the child had smiled at her at age 18 months.
Serena is in foster care, and Da Cruz's eldest three children have
been returned to her while she awaits trial for repeated violence
leading to a minor's permanent disability.

Tuscumbia, Alabama, police chief Tony Logan describes an incident in
which a 27-year-old man entered the washroom at a local Waffle House,
tied the door closed with his trousers, and climbed into the ceiling,
breaking a toilet and a sink on his way. His plan, which may have
been influenced by drugs, included making his way into the office area
to steal things. Instead, the underwear-clad would-be burglar fell into the dining area, where
patrons attempted to detain him. Although he escaped, his trouser
pockets remained. Their contents included a driving licence. Warrants were swiftly put out for the arrest of
one 27-year-old Wesley Glenn Bost.

Gender balance is provided by the next story, in which a woman fell
through a restaurant ceiling in Kingsport, Tennessee, apparently after
having removed a roof grate and the clothes on the lower half of her
body. She pulled herself back into the ceiling but fell again, just
in time for the police to catch her. A wallet was found on the
roof, and we now know that she is Harley C. Morton, 26.

Scotland's Edinburgh Evening News chronicles the hijinx that led to
Musselburgh's 29-year-old Ryan Dolan pleading guilty to
committing acts of public indecency at a McDonald's. Nicole
Lavelle, an officer with Scotland's independent public prosecution
service, explained in court that Dolan shed his trousers and treated
5am customers to a dance that featured his freely swinging genitalia.
He pulled his trousers back on but soon changed his mind and entered
the staff area, where he 'pretend[ed] to serve customers and started
dancing again, carrying out helicopter-like moves with his penis'.
He completed his dance moves atop the service counter, then donned his
trousers yet again and left.
Reviewing CCTV footage, a police officer recognised Dolan, who had
been convicted twice for 'similar offences'. The sheriff fined him
the equivalent of 550 euros for the offence, of which alcohol had left him
with little to no recollection.

Our next Clippings subject, also from Scotland, was fully clothed at the time of his
misadventures, which left him unconscious and without a penis or
testicles. Authorities in Haddington initially believed
that a friend had held the 22-year-old victim down while his
peanut-butter-smeared genitalia were gnawed at by bulldog
Biggie Smalls. However, when the man regained consciousness, he
reported that he had smeared the food spread on his crotch himself while
alone in the room with the dog.

A patient receiving heart-valve surgery at Newcastle's Freeman
Hospital died at the hands of a flailing surgical robot and surgeon
Sukumaran Nair, who had turned down opportunities for hands-on
training with the robot. His boss Simon Haynes later told a coroner's
inquest of having granted Nair's request to perform the state-of-the-art procedure
despite reservations - for instance, Nair was 'slow' at standard surgeries.
Haynes stated that he'd been reassured by the knowledge that 'proctors' would be present to
advise, though not authorised to intervene. These were two
representatives of Edwards Lifesciences, whose devices
were used in the surgery. Quietly leaving the operating theatre
once those devices were implanted, they did not witness most of the panic,
in which the suturing went awry and the robot arm hit a nurse.
In the wake of an official report characterising him as 'running
before you could walk', Nair has moved to another hospital.

When Adrian Dreshuan Middleton returned to his car after 1.5 hours of
shopping for clothes at a second-hand shop in Houston, Texas, he didn't know why
his six-year-old daughter was crying. After all, he had left her and
her one-year-old brother with plenty of food and water and left a film
playing for them in the air-conditioned vehicle. Stating that she had
'done something bad', the girl soon clarified that she
had become angry at her sibling for crying ceaselessly. He stopped
crying, apparently falling asleep, once she'd wrapped a seat belt around him.
Middleton, 26, has been charged with child abandonment in connection
with the boy's death by strangling.

Alyssa Noceda, an 18-year-old Washington resident, passed out
when getting high with 20-year-old boyfriend Brian Varela.
His friends soon received a group text message with a photo of the
unconscious Noceda and Varela's comments that he was having sex with
her to 'pass the time' while she overdosed. He would later tell a
friend that 'she died having sex with me'.
In the following days, Varela kept the corpse in his mobile home,
using Noceda's thumb print to unlock her mobile phone so that he could
fake social-media posts from her about a plan to run away from home.
A co-worker at Dairy Queen contacted the police after hearing Varela
explain all this.
After being sentenced to a little under three years in jail, Varela
said: 'What I get is what I deserve.' Judge Linda Kerse disagreed,
expressing regret that sentencing guidelines limited the punishment
she could dish out to him.

In Hollywood, Florida, two teenagers decided to engage in horseplay in
an abandoned bank building. This led to one of the youths, a
17-year-old boy, ending up in the vault with the door closed behind
him. The other teenager summoned the emergency services, who enlisted
the aid of the fire department, a technical rescue crew, and at least
two vault technicians from a private firm in attempts to free the boy
by drilling through the wall of the former Bank of America branch.
About three hours after becoming trapped, the boy was released but
not because of any of those efforts. An employee at the branch's new
location, across the street, walked over and supplied the vault combination.
According to Officer Christian Lata, the teenagers were released into
their parents' custody.

We end with another item from Florida, about what transpired after
37-year-old Shanetta Yvette Wilson broke wind while in the payment
queue at a Dollar General shop. According to a Broward County
Sheriff's Office report, a customer near her in the queue complained
about the loud fart, whereupon an argument ensued, which escalated to
Wilson producing a small folding knife from her handbag and telling
the fart-averse man that she would gut him. Wilson has been charged
with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill.

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